From self-funded start-up to a multi-million dollar company, DataDirect Networks is firmly supplanted in the Big Data scalable storage space. In an interview with our live news desk at the Strata conference today, theCube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, along with Jeff Denworth VP Marketing, DataDirect Networks, talked about DataDirect’s appliances, and what they mean for the Hadoop platform.

“Hadoop wasn’t really built by storage people. We’re making Hadoop nodes faster and easier to deploy.” DataDirect isn’t the medium in the pricing model either, and Jeff says that is by design. DDN has a suite of storage appliances that serves notice for its claim to be the fastest platform for Big Data.

Jeff hinted at the next steps in the Hadoop deployment on its appliances with IO pipelines, IO scaling and a real effort to drive down the cost of your Hadoop cluster. At Strata today DDN unveiled hScaler, a significant breakthrough over existing analytics applications. It is the industry’s first ApacheTM Hadoop platform for Big Data, with integration and flexibility optimized specifically for the enterprise. hScaler is engineered to enable IT departments to power Hadoop-based analytics with little to no learning curve typical on mainstream Hadoop adoption.

The hScaler appliance is scheduled for general availability on March 31, 2013.

A cool factoid at the beginning of his interview: Jeff said that DDN recently closed it’s first terabyte-a-second filing system.  Big Data is starting to become BigGER data.  We’ll provide the full interview in an archived clip later this evening.

See the full segment below, and check our YouTube channel for more exclusive content from Strata and other great events in the Big Data and cloud spaces.  We’ll be broadcasting live from Strata all week, so stay tuned!